Maine

14 migrant workers killed in van crash

A van full of migrant workers veered off a one-lane bridge and plunged into a river in the northern Maine wilderness Thursday, killing 14 people in the deadliest traffic accident in state history, officials said.

The lone survivor escaped by kicking out the back window as the van sank in 15 feet of water 90 miles from the nearest paved state road, said Stephen McCausland of the Maine Public Safety Department.

The accident happened on an unpaved logging road near the entrance to the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, a state-administered area popular with canoeists 300 miles north of Portland. State police and divers had to scramble to get to the site aboard float planes and helicopters.

The survivor said the van was traveling at 70 mph before arriving at the bridge, McCausland said. There is no speed limit on logging roads, which are privately owned.

Ohio

Powder in Columbus came from nail gun

The substance that was sniffed by bomb-detecting dogs, leading to the evacuation of a state office tower, was a powder used in nail guns, police said Thursday.

No nail gun was found in the van where the two dogs detected the powder, but the company that owns the vehicle often uses .22-caliber nail guns with cartridges containing smokeless nitrate powder, state trooper Lt. Gary Lewis said.

The search and two-hour evacuation of the 41-story James A. Rhodes State Office Tower, which houses about 4,000 people, came on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. The evacuation was ordered after a worker said the van’s driver told her, “I’m here to hide a bomb.”

Oscar Sesmas, 35, who police said was installing window blinds at the building, was charged with inducing panic. His lawyer told a judge Thursday that Sesmas was joking and knows what he did was wrong.

New York

5,631 people cash in on 9-1-1 lottery numbers

Officials say it was just a coincidence, but many people found it chilling and maybe suspicious, too: On the anniversary of Sept. 11, the winning numbers in the New York lottery were 9-1-1.

Lottery officials said Thursday that 5,631 people had selected the tragic numbers. They won $500 each.

“The numbers were picked in the standard random fashion using all the same protocols,” said lottery spokeswoman Carolyn Hapeman. “It’s just the way the numbers came up.”

The 9-1-1 combination was picked so often, it reached the lottery’s set limit for combinations and sold out by Tuesday evening, Hapeman said. On any given day, seven to 10 sets of numbers are “closed out,” she said.

There is a 1-in-1,000 chance of the numbers 9-1-1 coming up.

A similar coincidence occurred Nov. 12 when the numbers 5-8-7 came up in the New Jersey lottery the day American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in New York City.

Washington

West Nile virus found in donated blood

Government scientists said Thursday they had found West Nile virus in blood collected from three different donors and transfused into a Mississippi woman who subsequently came down with the infection.

The discovery provides strong new evidence that the West Nile virus can be spread through blood transfusions, and raises the possibility that prevalence of the microbe in the blood supply of certain parts of the country may be much higher than previously suspected.

An official of the Food and Drug Administration called finding the virus in so many donors “fairly surprising and … unexpected.” The agency’s embarking on studies to try to find out what fraction of blood donors this summer were carrying the virus, the official said.